bill clinton got 43% of the vote that year. president bush got 37% of the vote. and even though it is always a bad idea to do math on television, this one isn't that hard. if you add up 43 and 37 you do not get anywhere near 100% of the vote. what happened to the rest of the vote? the wacky thing about the 1992 election in terms of thinking about american binary red versus blue party politics is that another guy who ran that year, a third person, got almost 20% of the vote. it was ross perot, right? giant sucking sound. ross perot got a very large proportion of the vote for a third-party candidate. nearly 20%. and who knows how the votes would have been divided between bill clinton and george h.w. bush had ross perot not been in there that year. but one thing that's often forgotten about the 1992 race was that ross perot was not the only third-party candidate who ran that year. there was a whole slate of other third-party candidates nominated that year who did not make as big a spsh as mr. sucking sound did. they did as well as third-party candidates usually do,